"The Affective Arc of Environmental Studies Undergraduate Curricula"

The following is an abstract of my chapter in Jenn Ladino and Kyle Bladow's forthcoming Affective Ecocriticisms:

“The task is not to shrink ourselves into a corner, to dissolve ourselves into ‘no impact,’ but rather to find another, new, even spectacular way […] to co-inhabit this world” (Weston, xiv).

Told their whole lives to “leave no impact” on the planet, or worse, to “save the planet, kill yourself,” undergraduate Environmental Studies (ES) students today are seduced into a kind of green, self-erasing nihilism. During their baccalaureate studies, ES students go from being idealistic and optimistic to despairing and apathetic when they learn how unjust the world is, and how entrenched our environmental crises are.  Their courses do not help them imagine recourse to their complicity in social and environmental injustices across the globe. They are certain that anything they could individually do would never be enough to address the vast scale of problems.  And more, they become pessimistic about the ability of existing institutions and systems to act in anything but the interests of capitalist growth. ES students often leave college not the well-trained, problem-solving leaders that ES programs promise on their websites, but deflated, aimless, self-loathing, ashamed, angry, and apathetic.  

This chapter argues that greater attention to the affective experiences of ES students within ES curricula is crucial to developing the generation of environmental leaders so many programs claim to be training. But it is not only a matter of meeting our outcomes; it is an pedagogical concern: it is unethical to expect students to devote themselves to saving the planet, but then fail to prepare them affectively and psychically for this challenge, as if the intellectual projects of our syllabi and curriculum design are separate from students’ embodied lives. Those who study ES programs understand that a poorly-organized ES experience creates an “urgency + despair = apathy” scenario (Maniates), but less scholarship is devoted to articulating the alternatives, and even less acknowledges the centrality of students’ emotional responses to their coursework to generating or failing to generate the next generation of thinkers and leaders.

I examine the affective experiences of undergraduate Environmental Studies (ES) majors, with the aim of offering insights about environmental affect for the development of undergraduate ES programs and curricula. ES syllabi often end with a hopeful turn, in order to avoid leaving students completely nihilistic and paralyzed by despair.  But I want to offer a deeper critique of this classic “arc of hope” narrative.  Building on Heather Houser’s critique of the positive affects of hope and optimism in Ecosickness, Sara Ahmed’s various critiques of happiness, and the growing literature on hope in the environmental movement (Solnit, McKibben, Weston, and Bristow et al, for example) and in critical pedagogy (hooks, Duncan-Andrade, Freire, Fiskio, and West, for example), I will argue that we undermine the potential of these future planet-savers by suggesting that hope alone will adequately prepare them for the turbulent waters ahead. This literature also insists that making material relevant to and respectful of students’ whole selves, not just their minds or desire to obtain employment upon graduating, is necessary for retaining underrepresented students.  Thus, I also want to argue, ES curricula need to be more attentive to students’ affective lives if they want to not only attract underrepresented students, but to help them to thrive in college.

To these ends, I will argue that ES curricula must trouble students’ assumptions about happiness, provide them tools to critically analyze the effects of environmental narratives on their energies, challenge their views of what “counts” as social change, and deconstruct their attachments to binaries like theory/action and objectivity/subjectivity, hard/soft skill, and problem-solving/academic. These skills are needed in order to avoid slipping into paralysis, for destabilizing existing power relations, and for creating the affective conditions for sustaining mind and body in the face of crisis.  As the very “conversation around hope within environmental discourse is itself anguished,” leading to either naiveté or techno-optimism, as Houser argues (219), I suggest a variety of these more complex strategies, which achieve two goals I will explore in this essay: they acknowledge that ES syllabi and curricula are environmental narratives and should therefore be analyzed as a discourse of “ecosickness”, and, most importantly, they help “set into motion the messy emotions that can […] direct our energies toward planetary threats” and action (Houser, 223). When ES students graduate, as much as they need to know the details of environmental problems and the uneven benefits and burdens of their solutions, they need the affective disposition and the imaginations to intervene as engaged citizens. 

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. “Happy Objects.” The Affect Theory Reader. Edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

---. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Duncan-Andrade, Jeff. “Note to Educators: Hope Required When Growing Roses in Concrete.” Harvard Educational Review 79:2 (Summer 2009).

Fiskio, Janet. “Building Paradise in the Classroom.” Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities. Edited by Stephen Siperstein, Stephanie Lemenager, and Shane Hall. New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2016. (manuscript provided by author).

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

hooks, bell. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope.  New York: Routledge, 2003.

Houser, Heather. Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

Maniates, Michael. “Teaching for Turbulence.” State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible? The Worldwatch Institute, 2014. Website.

McKibben, Bill. Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth. Milkweed, 2007.

Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Nation Books, 2005.

--- A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. Penguin, 2010.

Bristow, Tom, Thom van Dooren, and Cameron Muir. “Hope in a Time of Crisis: Environmental Humanities and Histories of Emotions.” Histories of Emotions. Website. Accessed February 1, 2016.

West, Cornel. The Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption. Beacon Press, 1999.

Weston, Anthony.  Mobilizing the Green Imagination: An Exuberant Manifesto. New Society Publishers, 2012.